Saturday, February 25, 2017
Nancy Willard, R. I. P.
Nancy Willard, June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017: Nancy Willard was the author of more than 70 books, including more than 40 books for children, such as the Anatole trilogy, Firebrat (1988), East of the Sun and West of the Moon: A Play (1989), and Pish, Posh Said Hieronymus Bosch (1991), illustrated by the Dillons. She won the Newbery Award in 1982 for her book of poetry, William Blake’s Inn, illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen. It was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery.
Off Rock -- Kieran Shea
It's the year 2278, and there's still no cure for the flu, which is just one of the many problems that plague Jimmy Vik in Off Rock. Not that he has the flu, but the guy supervising his shift does, and that means that Jimmy's former girlfriend is his supervisor when he discovers a huge hunk of gold on the asteroid where he's working as a miner. The gold isn't supposed to be there, and Jimmy is contemplating ways of getting it for himself. And if he can, the problem becomes one of how to get it "off rock."In a way, Off Rock is a caper novel, at least to begin with, because there's a lot of careful planning involved with moving that gold. Unfortunately for Jimmy Vik, he has to team up with a shady character named Jock, who's not only treacherous but marked for death by a shady organization that's sent a beautiful assassin to the asteroid to kill him. And then things get complicated.
One of the things I enjoyed about Off Rock, besides the story, was the very real world that Shea creates. It's a scruffy, lived-in world, and it's very well done. The book zips right along, the plotting is clever, there's humor, and Shea has a great time telling the tale. Check it out.
Rusty Puppy -- Joe R. Lansdale
Hap and Leonard are back in another East Texas crime novel in which Joe Lansdale blends humor and grim events as skilfully as ever. Hap and Leonard seem to attract trouble, and this time when they're hired to look into the death of the son of the woman to lives across the street from the detective agency where they work, things take a real turn for the dark and dangerous side. They also spend a heck of a lot more money working on the case than they get paid.The woman suspects that the police might be involved in her son's killing, and Hap and Leonard discover themselves involved with what might be the most corrupt police department in all of East Texas. One of the members of the department is an old enemy of Leonard's, which leads to even more trouble.
As usual, it's the characters and the dialogue that make a Lansdale novel special, and this one introduces Reba, a young girl whom Leonard describes as a 400-year-old vampire. I suspect she's going to be back in a future book or two. There are a couple of big martial arts battles, and plenty of sex and cussin'. I suspect that everyone who reads this blog is already familiar with Lansdale's work, but if you're not, it's time to find out what you're missing. Highly recommended.
The Barry Awards Nominees
The Rap Sheet: Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has announced its contenders for the 2017 Barry Awards in four categories.
Friday, February 24, 2017
15 Intense Facts About 'Cape Fear'
15 Intense Facts About 'Cape Fear': In 1991—long before the term "gritty reboot" came into this world and lost all of its meaning—Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro teamed up to make a gritty reboot of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 thriller Cape Fear.
Bonus FFB: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft
Robert Bloch mentioned in Once Around the Bloch that he'd written an introduction to a hefty Arkham House collection of H. P. Lovecraft's work. It happens that I have a copy of that book. Not the Arkham House edition but the Ballantine reprint. I hadn't read Lovecraft's work since the '50s, so I thought it might be fun to dip into it again and see what I thought.The complete Table of Contents is below. The stories I read were "The Rats in the Walls," "The Outsider," "The Call of Cthulhu," and "The Dunwich Horror," all of which I'd read back in the old days. I had no trouble at all with the writing style. In fact, I was quite comfortable with the long paragraphs, the lengthy descriptions, the many adjectives, the arcane vocabulary. It was like visiting an eccentric old friend. Not that the stories were as effective as they once were. There's a big difference in reading Lovecraft as a teenager and as a really old guy. I think this is particularly obvious in "The Outsider." Has there ever been a sensitive teen who didn't read this and identify with the narrator, even at the very end? Especially at the end, maybe. Great stuff. The creepiness factor in the other stories is still high, but it's not the same as it was in the old days.
Lovecraft has come under a lot of fire lately for his racist attitudes. I wonder how many people will toss the book aside when reading "The Rats in the Walls" when they come to the name of the narrator's cat. Probably quite a few. There are lots of references in the stories to degeneracy and mongrelism, too, so be warned.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Heritage of Horror, by Robert Bloch
The Rats in the Walls
The Picture in the House
The Outsider
Pickman’s Model
In the Vault
The Silver Key
The Music of Erich Zann
The Call of Cthulhu
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Colour Out of Space
The Haunter of the Dark
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch-House
The Shadow Out of Time
FFB: Dead Man's Tide -- William Richards (Day Keene)
Someone (August West?) mentioned Dead Man's Tide in a comment on a long-ago post, so I thought I'd grab my copy and read it. My guess would be that Day Keene aimed this book right at Gold Medal, but it missed the cut. The opening is one that's been used many times before. Charlie Ames wakes up in a strange place with no memory of the night before. There's no dead body around, as there often is in this kind of story, but he sees a lot of blood. The body shows up, however; Ames is accused of murder, and the frame is a perfect tight fit. Even his wife doesn't believe he's innocent at first. When she does believe him, she searches for evidence to clear him. Finding something, she's knocked out and accused of a second murder.
Things happen fast, as you'd expect in a Keene novel, and if the gimmick is too obvious, there's a lot of Florida local color (both scenery and characters) to make up for it. The book was later republished by Avon as It's a Sin to Kill under the Keene byline. Check it out.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
The Master and Margarita -- Mikhail Bulgakov (Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, translators)
In the late 1960s, the Signet paperback edition of The Master and Margarita was all over the paperback racks. I loved the cover, but I was a grad student in American literature and didn't really have time to read a long Russian novel. After all, I was reading a lot of Gold Medal originals in my spare time. The other day I read that the book was Soon to Become a Major Motion Picture (not that is hasn't already been made into motion pictures and TV series), so I thought it was time for me to see what I'd been missing. The edition I picked up was published by Penguin Classics in 1997, and it's about 400 pages (not counting the end notes) of tiny print, not the kind of thing I usually read, but I persevered.
There are several main plot threads in the novel, but they're all connected with the arrival one day of the Devil and several of his pals (that's one of them on the cover pictured above) in Moscow. Hijinks ensue, to say the least. I'm not sure whether to call the book a fantasy or magical realism. Maybe some of you can help me out. Another plot thread has to do with Pontius Pilate on the day he condemns Jesus to be crucified. This is both a story told by the Devil and a novel written by the Master, who hardly appears in the first half of the book. Margarita appears even less and doesn't figure at all until the second half. But those two are the third strand of the plot, which I won't try to unwind for you. It's one of those books you just have to read for yourself.
If I knew more about the political, social, and literary goings on in Russia in the 1930s, maybe I could some up with some comments about the book's satire. I'm pretty ignorant of all those things, however, so I just enjoyed the story, the wild happenings, the humor, and the characters, who, I must admit, were a bit hard to keep up with because of the Russian names and the fact that everybody seems to have at least three or four names, most of which aren't like the others. Is this one of the great books of the 20th century, as it's often been called? You can't prove it by me, but I'm glad I read it.
Gator Update (Stolen Statue Edition)
Alligator statue stolen from Riverside home: "I would like for the people who caught it to be fed to some alligators," said Carr.
“Screaming Blue Murder—Writing For Television” (by Cath Staincliffe)
“Screaming Blue Murder—Writing For Television” (by Cath Staincliffe) | SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: Cath Staincliffe’s work first appeared in EQMM in January 2016. Her latest EQMM story, “The Rat,” is featured in our current issue, March/April 2017, and a third story will appear in EQMM later this year. The Manchester writer is a founding member of the Murder Squad, a collective of crime writers from the north of England. She came to EQMM later in her career than the other members of that group, which includes Martin Edwards, Ann Cleeves, Kate Ellis, Margaret Murphy, and Chris Simms. Long before her EQMM debut, Cath had become an award-winning novelist, radio playwright, and creator of the hit series Blue Murder for Britain’s ITV. She has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Best First Novel award and for the Dagger in the Library. She was also joint winner of the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2012. Her novel Letters To My Daughter’s Killer was selected for the Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club on ITV3 in 2014. She also writes the Scott & Bailey novels based on the popular television crime show. The Silence Between Breaths, her latest book, explores what happens when ordinary people are caught up in a terrifying and extraordinary event. In this post, Cath talks about her experiences writing for television.—Janet Hutchings
The Most Successful Songwriters in Rock History
Neatorama: Popular music in the early 1950s was all about cardigan sweaters and sanitized tunes. But then a pair of upstart songwriters taught teenagers how to let down their hair. Here's how two Jewish kids from the East Coast brought black music to white America.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Murder by the Book, Houston, 2/22/17
Bottom: Kathleen Kent and Joe R. Lansdale entertain the crowd.
Gary Cartwright, R. I. P.
One of my Texas writing heroes, whose career I've followed for 55 years or more.
Gary Cartwright dead at 82: Texas Monthly writer known for true crime: He specialized in true crime stories, such as spectacular case of Fort Worth millionaire Cullen Davis, charged with shooting his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea. Cartwright turned the lurid drama into the book “Blood Will Tell,” which was adapted into a TV miniseries.
Gary Cartwright dead at 82: Texas Monthly writer known for true crime: He specialized in true crime stories, such as spectacular case of Fort Worth millionaire Cullen Davis, charged with shooting his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea. Cartwright turned the lurid drama into the book “Blood Will Tell,” which was adapted into a TV miniseries.
I'm Sure You'll All Agree
Toptenz.net: When writing about this, we understand that based on their perspectives, some people may disagree partly with this list. However, with so many fake news sites out there, and so much propaganda, it can be useful to go over those news sources best known for holding their standards to something more approaching real and honest journalism. A true journalist isn’t out to change your mind, but rather to tell you what is happening.
Once Again Texas Leads the Way
Pecan Pie Vending Machine – Cedar Creek, Texas: A 24-hour vending machine restocked daily with homemade full-sized pecan pies.
They Can't Say I Didn't Warn Them
Hunters fight so-called 'feral hog apocalypse' in Texas
Key quote: “We’re gonna after possible the whole ecosystem.” That would be a disaster, all right.
Key quote: “We’re gonna after possible the whole ecosystem.” That would be a disaster, all right.
David Yorko, R. I. P.
David Yorko, 1943-2017: Rocker wasn’t ‘typical musician’: Known for instrumental hits such as “Red River Rock” and “Beatnik Fly,” the Rossford-based Johnny & the Hurricanes — fronted by saxophone player Johnny Paris — gained international fans.
Bonus FFB on Wednesday: The Case of the Lame Canary -- Erle Stanley Gardner
My copy of The Case of the Lame Canary is the one pictured here, the 23rd printing from 1954. It's probably been through dozens of more printings by now. I've had the book for years but hadn't read it. When I found myself in the mood for a Perry Mason case, I picked it up zipped through it.It's impossible for me to summarize a Perry Mason book because they're all quite complex. This one begins with a woman who brings a lame canary (lame because of incorrect nail trimming) with her to Mason's office. She also brings a story that doesn't hold up very well that involves some smooching, an automobile accident, and a few other things. Mason takes her case only because of the canary, thinking that he's been fooled into taking an uninteresting case. He's soon proved wrong, as murder enters the picture, along with a mysterious arson investigator who was involved in the accident, a lot of lies, and a lot of legal hanky-panky. There's a race against time involved, too, as Mason has promised to take his secretary, Della Street, on an around-the-world cruise if the case is resolved in time.
How Mason arrives at the solution is a little questionable, and the summing up is complicated with a lot of little things, but Mason is, as always, eight or ten steps ahead of everyone else. The book is fast (I'm guessing 80% or 90% dialogue) and fun, and if it's a little hard to swallow the whole explanation, who cares? Now I'm feeling the need to read another of Mason's cases.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
First It Was the Thin Mints Melee
Cops: Suspect Used Sex Toy During Attack: A Florida man punched his girlfriend and struck her with a “plastic dildo” when she criticized his performance as they were having sex, police allege.
Overlooked Movies -- And Then There Were None (1945)
The first Agatha Christie novel I ever read was Ten Little Indians which was originally published with a more offensive title and which later became And Then There Were None. I was 11 or 12 years old, and I thought it was terrific. Later on I saw the 1965 film in the theater, which is a lot different from the book and which, as it turns out, is also quite a bit different from the 1945 version, which, in turn, is different from the stage play. I liked the 1965 film when I saw it, though, and you can't go wrong with a movie that has Fabian in it. but the point is that while it's fairly famous, and while all of you have probably seen it, I'd overlooked the 1945 movie until now. As you can see on the poster to the left, the cast is top notch: Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Louis Hayward, Roland Young, June Duprez, Mischa Auer, C. Aubrey Smith, Judith Anderson, Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard No Fabian, though. René Clair directed, and the movie turned out to be a big hit.
I'm sure you know the setup. Eight people, none of whom have ever met before, are ferried to a deserted island. They've been invited by U.N. Owen. When they arrive at the only house on the island, they're greeted by two servants, but there's no sign of Mr. Owen. A recording is played and each of the guests is accused of murder or of having contributed to someone's death. So are the servants.
You know the rest. There's no way off the island for several days, and guests begin dying it ways mentioned in the "Ten Little Indians" rhyme. So who's behind it all? Who will live and who will die? If you've read the book, you might not get the answer to both of those right, since the ending has been "Hollywooded" a bit, but it's still fun to watch the cast go through their paces and to see the cleverness of the murderer. And to try to guess who it is, though that's not as hard as you might think. A very entertaining movie, and I'm glad I finally saw it.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Dick Bruna, R. I. P.
The Two-Way : NPR: Miffy the rabbit seems quite simple. Two black dots for eyes, a sideways X for a mouth, a body inked in gentle curves — the artistry of Dick Bruna's creation rests precisely in its apparent artlessness. And in the six decades since Miffy was first put to page, Bruna's venerable rabbit has earned the affection of young fans worldwide, the admiration of art critics and even an entire museum in her honor.
Hat tip to Deb.
Hat tip to Deb.
In Loco Presidentis: Who's In Charge Here?
Neatorama: It seems like a necessary and not terribly difficult thing to do—make sure someone is always running the country. But it took U.S. lawmakers nearly 200 years to get most of the kinks out of the presidential succession process. Not until the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1967 was the procedure for replacing an incapacitated president clarified. So what happened before that? Well, the government sort of made things up as it went along.
Bonus FFB on Monday: The Butcher's Wife --Owen Cameron
Owen Cameron seems to be a genuinely forgotten writer, although he had considerable success. The Butcher's Wife was recommended to me by Bill Pronzini, so I knew it would be a good one. Sure enough, it was.Harry Grass is a game warden who's not satisfied in his marriage. Part of the problem is his baby son, who doesn't please Grass as babies are supposed to please new parents. One day Grass sees a man who seems familiar leaving a parked car and acting suspicious. Grass checks out the car and finds bloodstains. When the trunk of the car is opened, two dismembered bodies are found inside.
It turns out that the man Grass saw is the husband of Grass' old flame, and it also turns out that Grass finds that the old flame still attracts him. Before long there's a manhunt, and Grass, although he's a game warden, gets involved. The result is a police procedural with the added interest of what Grass will do about his own situation. The conclusion isn't what I was expecting.
Cameron writes economical prose and leavens his dark story with humor. I'll have to check out some of his other books to see if they're as good as this one.
What Is Presidents Day?
What Is Presidents Day?: History: What are we celebrating on the holiday known as 'Presidents Day'? Is it really a holiday?
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Richard Schickel, R. I. P.
Variety: Richard Schickel, the longtime film critic for Time magazine who also wrote 37 books, mostly on film, and directed a number of documentaries on film subjects, died on Saturday in Los Angeles of complications from a series of strokes, his family told the Los Angeles Times. He was 84.
Clyde Stubblefield, R. I. P.
The New York Times: It took only 20 seconds for Clyde Stubblefield to drum his way to immortality. They came near the end of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” recorded in a Cincinnati studio in late 1969. Brown counts him in — “1, 2, 3, 4. Hit it!” — and Mr. Stubblefield eases into a cool pattern, part bendy funk and part hard march. It’s calm, slick and precise, and atop it, Brown asks over and over, “Ain’t it funky?”
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
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